Movie Reviews: Shrek The Third Pt. 2

Following Thursday's flood of critical complaints, a second wave of Shrek the Third criticism swept into daily newspapers today (Friday), some of it meaner than the original. For example, here's Dallas Morning News's Chris Vognar's appraisal of the movie: "The franchise that began as a sendup of classic fairy tales and all things Disney has become an all-purpose pop meat grinder, mashing in as many references as possible to mask the meager tracings of a story." "Three times ain't no charm," remarks Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail. On the other hand, unlike Thursday's notices, which were almost universally green-eyed, quite a number of rather mixed reviews are appearing today. Several critics concede that while they found the movie a disappointment they laughed a lot anyway. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post says that it represents a paradox: "It contains two theoretically self-canceling polarities. It's (a) quite funny and (b) quite bad. ... The end result is that you laugh a lot and you go home grumpy." Gene Seymour in Newsday likes at least part of the movie, writing, "For roughly its first half-hour ... Shrek the Third behaves the way a funny cartoon should; letting the gags do the work of getting laughs from the audience instead of leaning heavily on pop-culture references." A.O. Scott in the New York Times writes that compared with the earlier installments, this one "seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter." Rob Salem in the Toronto Star concludes: "As it turns out, Shrek the Third is just fine." And Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun concludes his review with the words: "Shrek the Third rules."